Star Citizen Live: Arena Commander and Star Marine

Arena Commander takes the core gameplay of Star Citizen, the core ship gameplay of Star Citizen, and puts it directly in front of you with no barriers, so that is Arena Commander for me. You select how you want to play, again, if it's horde mode, if it's survival horde modes, if it's multiplayer, swarm battles, squadron battles, something like this. So there's a lot of different ways to play that core combat, but really the mission statement is it is the core ship gameplay testing ground of Star Citizen. And Star Marine is no different, except it has to do everything with the actors, everything with the characters, everything with the armor, the FPS sort of gameplay side. So that is the petri dish of the core character gameplay for Star Citizen. So that's how I kind of put the two together. And then they are both simulations within the world, within the universe of Star Citizen. And they're basically games within our game. You access Electronic Access sort of like somebody would access the Oasis in Ready Player One or something like this. Electronic Access is ultimately that same second life inside of already a second life. It's a bit of a weird concept sometimes to get across, but I think generally the community understands it, and I want to do a little bit more to make that clear, that that is a thing.

I would say they are, but more from a development standpoint, less from a player standpoint, meaning, is it a perfect game right now? Heck no. We're definitely not. There's been new systems, there's new developments that have happened with ships, there's new scanning systems, there's so many new things that we're not quite taking all advantage of yet. There's ground vehicles, for example, and where's the ground vehicle in Arena Commander or Star Marine right now? Those kind of things. So there's new things that have come up that we're not taking advantage of right now, and I think we could be.

And that's a big part of why we've had this kind of renewed focus on Arena Commander and Star Marine.

And we've had it for a little while. It's just in terms of the resource share around the company, right? We've got two other games. Two little games. These other ones. Every time I go, well, there's this crash in Arena Commander, and they're like, well, do you want Squadron 42 shipping? And I'm like, wow. No, Arena Commander is much more important. So really, there's two games that actually have to take the resources long before Arena Commander, or let's just say Electronic Access, kind of gets them. And I'm not saying that that means that nothing happens, but it does mean that a lot fewer people are assigned to it. What we've really got to be intelligent about on Electronic Access is things that we do within the PU or Squadron 42, trying to make the most use out of those things that happen there to be able to apply them within Electronic Access. So a great example was some of the UI systems that have come online recently, and I'm sure we've talked about them on SC Live, like the building blocks technology and stuff like this. As that came online, it was like, great, we can apply all of that, fix the kill notifications, fix the score notifications, actually rebalance all that kind of stuff within there, because, again, the kill notifications have been broke for two releases or something to this effect. So yeah, trying to use things that are happening within the PU or Squadron 42 to benefit is the best way to get work done. But recently we get more and more resources to actually do some stuff. So I think a few quarters ago, we made some changes to team deathmatch as well as to deathmatch, and we even changed some of the maps around. So we're just going to continue doing stuff like this.

And I think it's also a change in mindset, really, in terms of being able to utilize, Sean touched on it when he said testbed, being able to utilize those two products in terms of Star Marine and Arena Commander, and actually utilize those as a testbed for the core gameplay. So when we've got new weapons, new armor coming online, or anything to do with the actual core gameplay, the general locomotion, that's something that we can utilize when we come out in Star Marine and really hone down and focus and get really concentrated feedback. So I think that's something of a mindset, especially since, like I said, the pillars are fairly new, and the combat pillar in itself. And that's something that we can really drive down and focus on.

Yeah, so some Pirate Swarm improvements coming already for Arena Commander. And actually, just a rework of the waves. I'll run down basically the list of things that have happened. So, first of all, we've rebalanced the difficulty curve over now 10 waves. It used to be, I think, 15. It was 12 for a time, but now it's 10. And we've rebalanced that difficulty curve not only with just the AI, but with your wingmen that are coming in and against certain ships. So you can complete this in a starter ship all the way up to kind of the biggest ship, and it should be a challenge through the whole thing. But it should be a ramp-up of challenge. And this is something that we're really, really trying to balance in now. And it's actually tricky, because it's a balance of not just the actual loadouts of the ships, not just what ships are coming in, but how many and how good your wingmen are that we bring in during certain waves. So it's a bit of a juggling act, really, to get that balance correct. One of the other exciting things is we increased the playable area. They're much bigger now. So again, the ships are moving a lot faster. People needed a lot more room to maneuver. And the other thing they needed was not to run into a wall. I've not been to space, but in all the movies I've seen, there's not a lot of walls in space. So the idea was to make this a soft boundary. It's a little more like other games where you'll go over the boundary. You know it's there, but you don't run into it like you've just run into a building or something like this. So that's a little bit better. And again, it just gives you a warning that you're outside of the range. Eventually it'll kill you if you don't come back in. So again, it plays a little bit nicer. Now, I say we increased the playable area in all the maps. It's not actually true. It's only on one of the maps right now. So in Dying Star, that's the one that's a lot, lot bigger. There's a reason for it, and it mostly has to do with the map itself and the assets that were within it. It was really easier to make Dying Star quite large, but on Broken Moon, everybody knows that that's not an actual planet, right? We haven't put a real planet within it. I mean, like a digital planet, one of the actual PU planets; it's actually just this hemisphere that, if you carried it around, isn't actually circular. It just looks nice.

It was built before procedural planets.

Well, it was built like the first actual playable level. Hangars were first and then this level came in. So it's about one of the oldest levels we have. That one was a little more tricky. So we started scaling it up, basically. LODs are a problem, and then you can actually really notice that that planet isn't really a planet. So we want to make some improvements to that map too. We will increase the size, and the obvious thing is, okay, just put a planet in. And that's what Chris has been saying, so we'll probably go ahead and do that. So we will make those changes to Broken Moon as well, but I think the boundary changes are also within Broken Moon. So that's nice stuff.

So the boundary changes for Broken Moon don't just apply to Pirate Swarm, they apply to any other...

That's right, any other mode that's within there. And again, this had a lot to do with the ships moving around a lot quicker. Added more ammo in the missile drops, so that was a little bit of a frustrating thing, that the missile drops weren't giving you enough ammo. You'd run out instantly, and it's a rewarding and fun sort of thing. We didn't want to have Arena Commander feel like it's super restricted ammo, super restricted weapons. We want them to play. We want them to not save too many of their missiles, too many of the things like this, because it's not that type of game. It's a little more arcadey than it is like a survival type thing. The other thing, a lot more ammo in the ballistic pickups. When you had the lower-sized weapons with just this high refire rate, you would run out of all your ammo. So that was another one. Speaking of the UI building blocks, we added objective hints. Not even hints. It's real direct: go do this. One of the big pieces of feedback that we'd get from Arena Commander, or just generally for the game, is that readability of what actions I need to take is a little bit hard. So we make it very obvious. And now that we've got building blocks, we can kind of do all this stuff. We added more ships across the waves and some different ships. Also, repairs are available a lot sooner. This has to do with it being a little bit more challenging now, that the repairs need to be available a little bit sooner, otherwise it's just kind of frustrating. I can run through the ships, but I think it's better that you guys play it. And then the biggest change actually is in the last wave, wave 10: after a bit of a delay, we're going to spawn 10 friendly Merlins, but there's a Hammerhead at the end. Now, a Hammerhead is a tough ship. It is not easy, and it's not meant to be easy. It's a boss. It's just this little boss fight, basically. But you've got a chance to take out that ship on your own. But after a short delay, you're gonna get 10 Merlins on your side. And this is the thing: a lot of people, they'll spend a little bit of time with the Hammerhead and they're like, okay, I give up. The shields are too strong. There's not much I can do. But we wanted to give you a little bit of that sense of 'I'm not sure you're going to make this one', and then bring in those Merlins. So it's pretty exciting at the end. It's a nice climactic end, because, again, I found the waves before, though they were fine, it just was pretty flat in terms of an excitement kind of curve. So at the end of it, we get a good climactic event, and you take out this Hammerhead. So generally, that's pretty much the improvements for 3.7. And again, this was just a small set of people. We think it's a lot more fun than even just bringing in one or two of the stronger ships. It's a little fun, especially with a Hammerhead, to see a lot of them little ships going, because when the Hammerhead's going, you've got the turrets going, you've got everything. It's pretty exciting. And we wanted to make it a little more exciting, but we've got to wait for another release to do it, give a little final cinematic at the end too.

So FPS scanning will be similar to ships. It will have a unique nuance in the fact that FPS scanning, and what I call FPS radar in terms of its ping system, will actually be less passive. So it will be something that you actively use rather than it being on all the time. So I think the passive version will actually only search for audio, so for decibels. So if you hear people in the distance, or if you hear gunshots from an FPS point of view, then it will obviously appear on your radar. But if you actually actively ping, that will then track the other emissions. So you'll get EM and IR. And then eventually, later down the line, as we start to work towards armor gameplay, that's when armor will start to give off those emissions and things like that. And then you can bring in different components in terms of different levels of FPS radar, in terms of FPS scanning. And obviously FPS scanning will have similar functionality: you'll be able to select or highlight over a target, and then that will give you more information on that target, loadout and so on and so forth. So the plans are that we want the FPS and the ships to feel like a similar experience. We don't want you to get out of the ship and it's a totally different experience than when you're in the ship. So we want to have that kind of holistic approach, that approach where you feel like everything's connected, that all of these disparate systems are playing together for one unique experience. That's kind of the overall idea for FPS radar and scanning. That's something that we'll be working on, absolutely, in the future.

I should clarify the question. That's not something that's coming online with Alpha 3.7. That question is more about design philosophy going forward.

Absolutely. So that's something that we've got on our minds. It's something that we're working towards. And as you know, in terms of the roadmap and so on and so forth, we've got lots to work on. But in terms of general idea and philosophy, that's the principle.

Sure, and Rich went over it just exhaustively anyways, even in the last quarter. And it's something that we're doing now on the combat pillar almost specifically: we really try to get out in front of the designs for the implementation. So we've got a great idea of what we're doing on the combat pillar actually till the middle of next year at this point, and actually even the next quarter, quarter three. So Rich is real good at this. He's already seeing something coming in the quarter forward from that, so he's already getting the design all worked out. And by worked out, I mean pretty exhaustive by the time we get to it. It's like we know exactly what we're doing at the moment that we do. And that's why in the last couple months, anyways, we've been able to get some pretty huge features out from the actor team, like the personal commodity inventory, the animation actually. We haven't done that one yet. That one's coming in in 3.8. That's going to be a nice one, though. I really like that. Animation speed-ups for some stuff. Anyways, just wanted to give a shout-out to Rich for doing designs ahead of time.

Fundamentally, it's about making sure that all of the designs, since we're making a big game, that all of those designs tie in together. And if you design something today, but you don't take into account what's coming in the future, then all of a sudden, when you design that future system, you have to look back and go, actually, we need to change this. And then you get a scenario where you're having to change a lot of things. Now, obviously, that's not always possible, but I think it's always a good philosophy to try and take into account everything that's going to come in, so that you can go, okay, how is this going to impact this? How is actor status going to impact the health system, or how is stamina going to play into the different locomotions? So I think that's kind of the overall general principle and philosophy that we're trying to aim for, to make sure that when it all comes in, it creates something that we actually want.

Yeah, we want to do the same thing. And actually, really interestingly, the internal AI teams, they kind of want the same thing. So this one takes a little bit of markup on the maps. We've got to get a wave spawner in. We've got some basics to this where we can preplace the characters. But what we want to do is have a little more, I hate to say it, but a systemic setup where it's much more procedural. And by procedural, it's more just generated, right? I want to put a spawner in. I want to say what kind of guy I want: whether I want a male or female, whether it's a rich guy, poor guy, whether you've got lots of guns, whether you've got a few guns, whether he's really got good abilities or not, and the designers would be able to set all this kind of stuff and ramp up over time. But actually, the whole existence of the Good Doctor map has a lot to do with wanting to do a swarm mode. So this was something that came down from Chris and Erin, that they wanted that within Star Marine, absolutely. And it's such an obvious thing, because we are actually doing that within Arena Commander. We've got two different survival modes already, and we don't have a single one within Star Marine. And a lot of that just comes down to the actual development of that given AI. Now, I don't want to go super into detail, because that's another pillar, another director, another set of people that are working on that. But of course, Squadron AI has to be the top priority, and then the PU next, and then everything within here. So just like I said at the start, as they progress on the Squadron AI, as they progress on the PU AI, we will take advantage of that kind of stuff. But right now, the best spot in the PU is this underground facility with this stuff. So for me, it wasn't yet enough to be able to make a really reasonable sort of swarm survival horde Star Marine mode, but very soon we will be there. And again, the Good Doctor map was actually built and incepted to do specifically that. Now, we didn't want to just hold on to that map...

And wait until the AI was done.

And wait until the AI was done. We had it, and making a deathmatch map is not too dramatically difficult in terms of sight lines and things like this. So we figured, why not release that while we wait for the AI to kind of be in a state that we want to do that.

And by releasing the map earlier, players get to beat on it a bit. You show us some of the shortcomings of it, and we can iterate.

Yeah. It's bad to say it this way, but yeah, we get some free QA, is kind of the thing. But it's good. I mean, it's a good deal, right? Because you guys get some new content. We get some new feedback. Everybody wins. That's how it's supposed to work.

And also, when we do actually work towards the PvE side of things, one thing that we will get is a different set of feedback. So when it's PvP, when it's player against player, and when we have that more focused experience in the Good Doctor or any other map that we eventually add AI to, I think that will give us some really good feedback. It will be different compared to the PvP feedback, potentially a different player base, in terms of people really focused on the PvE side or the PvP side. I think from a holistic point of view, getting all of that information would be something that would be really good going forward, and allow us to get that feedback to actually balance it for Squadron and for the PU.

So this is actually, you can actually just see outside here, the internal reception area for the Good Doctor map. It's actually one of the first maps that we have that's actually embedded on a real planet. So as we were talking about before, this is actually a real planet that this is embedded on, and this is the internal, kind of the main atrium area that provides the access from outside to the interior, and to the habitation on the other side, and then to the science labs on this side. So here you can see this is actually the science labs, and you can see it's a different feel. And that's something that we really wanted to have, a difference compared to the other maps that are already released: this map, we wanted it to feel fairly light and bright. So you can see in the atrium it's got that exterior lighting, and here it's fairly bright, and it fits in with this science. But you also get these unique areas of the map. In some other maps, where it's quite dark, you can't really tell where you are. In this, it's very clear; this gives you a really good read on the areas that you are in. And then this is more the habitation side of things. So the habitation, obviously it's been more dressed up, it's warmer colors, whereas the science labs part of it is colder colors. And we really spent a lot of time on the FPS side to make sure we got good lines of sight, good areas. And also, if I actually just switch back to here, one of the big things we wanted to do was push some of the lines of sight, so that you weren't just going around a corner and it was a quick shoot-off, so that we have some more medium to longer range gameplay. So as we keep going, this is more of a top-down view of that initial atrium area. And then if I keep going, this is now outside. We've got the outside areas fairly fleshed out. You can't actually jump off onto the planet as much as you probably will want to. So it's still a kind of focused experience in terms of this map. But it just provides a bit of difference, that you can go interior and exterior and get a bit of a sense of more representative gameplay that would be in the PU, rather than just a specific gameplay mode. Here we've got another exterior, or the interior looking outside. Then some more of the habitation areas. But I really like the art on this, so you can see some of, if we touch on the lore, how the Good Doctor came to be and how it fits into the lore of Star Citizen.

Well, yeah, it's one of the things when I took some of this combat pillar stuff over and we were talking about the Arena Commander and Electronic Access games. Overall, the thing that always surprised me was the amount of lore, even working here, that we have. I mean, the stories are just... there's so many, and so many interesting ones. And I felt like, okay, some of them are not big enough to tell in a grand Squadron 42 game, or maybe not even big enough to tell in missions or something. But maybe the scenario is something that we can tell within Star Marine or Arena Commander. Why don't we make this less about a game where it's like, okay, log in, get your ship, kill 10 waves. It's just not as compelling when we have as much lore as we have. So I really, really want to be telling kind of scenario-based stories. And what this makes is something that's a little more, you can set it up to be like an objective-based game mode where it's actually telling stories from the lore. And wouldn't this be what the Electronic Access thing would be? Because again, we talked about the concept of the Oasis within Star Citizen, right? So Electronic Access is this Oasis. Now, what would those people do with it, within Star Citizen? So you're a person, you live in the 'verse, what do you do for fun? Well, in the same way that we, I'm sorry, I'm not American, so the Gettysburg, what do they call this? Reenactments. Things like reenactments, or we go to the medieval fair, or we go watch knights beat the crap out of each other with wooden swords, well, some people steel swords, or what is that, the Renaissance Fair, right? And I talk about it like I've gone to all of these things so many times, but not quite yet. So basically, being able to retell those certain scenarios from within the Star Citizen lore, whether it was a hundred years ago in terms of the PU time, to the actual time that they were telling about. Because, for example, The Good Doctor is a hundred years before the time of the PU. It's a whole thing that happened before. But I think telling that story within the objectives of the map is just so much more compelling than jumping into a deathmatch map and it feeling like Quake or Doom, just for the sake of having a deathmatch. I want to tell some scenarios. I want to tell some of the stories, because I think they're quite interesting.

And to be honest, I think it also helps us that we're tying Star Marine, and eventually Arena Commander, to the PU. It is a connected experience. It is, like we said, about Electronic Access. It's this game within a game. And we want to make them feel like they're connected. And it's not just, like you said, you load up and it's a 10-wave deathmatch and it just feels like it's just a different scenario. But it is actually connected, it's part of the PU. And that's something that we want to get across, that feeling that it is an extension of the PU.

Now, this is of course stuff that we're working towards. As far as what they're going to see in 3.7, it's this map brought forward on its own to serve as a deathmatch map.

And then, to give you a great example, we hope to put it in a patch, but we're grabbing some new audio that is going to again support the lore and the story behind The Good Doctor. Within, again, whether it's 3.7.1 or 3.7.2, we'll have some of the voiceovers to update. And then as we progress on the swarm mode or AI or anything like that, that's when we'll really be able to tell that story right. I'm sure people are thinking, oh my god, they're going to put zombies. And no, we won't put zombies. But the story of the Good Doctor has a lot to do with the cultists. So Dr. Fayou was basically a very, very charming and great leader, a good inspirer. And a lot of the screens that you see within The Good Doctor are quotes from him, or they're things that basically the Outsiders, as they're actually termed, quote themselves on anyway. So I think it'll be an interesting thing to be able to do that.

It would be a super easy way to make an FPS map, but you wouldn't have made an FPS map. That's the problem. I thought the same thing. It's like, okay, cool, we've got all these ship interiors, oh my goodness, we've got the Starfarer, you've got the Caterpillar, these things are whole levels in themselves, why don't we just grab the interiors of those and fight in them? Well, the problem is they've not really been designed to do FPS combat, deathmatch, or team deathmatch, or balanced in such a way that it would be fun to play. I think you can do that. And actually, we see these on livestreams and stuff like this, where people do have fun doing it. But I mean, there's only one hallway to get through a thing, for example, right? Most of our players don't shoot like stormtroopers. They're actually pretty good. So you ain't going to be getting through that door. It's things like that. It's just not going to be as fun. Because those ship interiors weren't necessarily designed with, hey, team A is here, and team B is here, and these are attackers, these are defenders, this is the sight line, this is the sight line. They were designed with interior ship design in mind, for obvious reasons, right?

The operation of the ship in the PU, not deathmatch.

Exactly. So I would say that a cooler thing would be modes like, again, trying to board or do something like that, where you've got to disable ships. And again, if we could tell the scenario where it's disable the ship, board the ship, go through the ship, whether it's fighting AI within the ship or fighting other players, I think that's a more interesting thing than just dropping the interior of a ship in and then fighting.

So instead of using something like a Caterpillar or a Hammerhead or an 890 Jump for a deathmatch, you're talking about considering something like an entirely new game mode, specifically to practice breaching, getting through the ship and taking it over.

And maybe get away from game mode and think scenario, right? We would set up a scenario that would just make sense for that. And again, there's so many stories in the lore. I open up Confluence, and lucky for me, I can get access to all the Dave stuff, where there's so much in there that you can come up with so many things just from those stories that are within there. Again, I think that's the way to go. Rather than game mode, scenario.

And when you see these things on stream, that's how they're setting it up too. They're creating their own scenario.

Because it's way more fun. And it's a little more meaningful too. And actually, it's fun to watch too.

So not just a blank-check deathmatch or team deathmatch, but a specifically crafted scenario.

It's incredibly uninspired, if you think about it. Deathmatch, right?

So medical gameplay is something, again, that we wanted to take into account for lots of different things. So we've been looking at it early on. It's something that will be coming in the future. If you play Battlefield or any other online shooter or game like that, you've got the defibrillators and you can actually go and help your teammate up. So in terms of a team match, or these scenarios that we're discussing, the ability to actually revive your teammate and bring him back from the depths, rather than having to respawn at a particular area, obviously that would change the dynamics. So it's absolutely something that we're looking at. Obviously, within our game, we'll actually have a more detailed analogy going forward, in terms of you being able to heal others, heal yourself. And we actually do want to move the MedPens so that you're actually carrying them in your hand, so that rather than just an automatic use, it is something that you can equip and then target and things like that. So obviously, we're thinking about it. We're in the very early stages of coming up with the design and making sure how that fits into the PU, into Squadron, into Star Marine. So it's absolutely something that's on the agenda.

Yeah, we've actually worked on a design for this already with the internal game team that we've got there. Again, it's not a ton of people by any stretch, so we can only work on stuff slowly. And it's the same even for myself. I've got this combat pillar here, but I've also got three other departments that I run at the same time. So again, there's some amount of work that goes into it. So we do a lot of the design work anyway. So design's already been done for that, let's call it a lobby anyways, but it's really a change to the lobby, matchmaking, and friend group kind of support, but outside of the PU, at the launcher kind of level or at the main menu kind of level. So yeah, we've already done that, and that is so important to be able to do, because right now, for example, if me and Rich wanted to go play in a Super Hornet, and we want to do Vanduul Swarm, Pirate Swarm, whatever, to make that happen is kind of a pain, because we both have to join, we've got to get to the same thing, he's going to go bail out of whatever ship he got, he's going to go get into my ship, and then we can progress, and then if we die or something, we've got to do it all over again. So I think that's pretty silly. We need to be able to group up long before we're in the map, and then choose that map as a group, and whether there's a group leader or something like that. So we've got that design actually in place, and you could call it a fleet manager, you could call it however you want, but it's really important that we're able to not only say what friends are in your group, what they're doing, what you're about to go do, but also be able to place those guys within seats within the ship, because just getting them spawning standing in the cargo bay is not that useful. It's better than what we've got. Sometimes you don't even have that. So again, like on a Super Hornet, if I want Rich to be gunning and I want to be piloting, I want to be able to set that up and then join the game, right? So yeah, we've got the design for it. So the technical things that are in front of that have everything to do with the matchmaking services. So you'll be happy to know, though, that we just completed the whole changeover and the refactor of this. So we are not thinking about a refactor, we've just completed it. So that's all done. And that needed to happen in the last three to six months or so, and it had to happen for the PU for other reasons anyways, VoIP and all these things. So now that that's done, we can actually pull that out and we can change the matchmaking that was set up with that first map, Broken Moon, five years ago. So we can upend that, we can get our group system at the front end a lot more robust and a little bit easier to use. And this way we can shunt them into a ship together or whatever. The other nice little benefit that's going to come, and I don't know if it'll hit 3.8 or 3.9, but it'll be right between the two of them, is it'll allow us to do our round cycling. So one of the things that really annoys me with Star Marine significantly, and Arena Commander a little bit, is that once you complete a round, you've lost, you've won or whatever, you're kicked all the way back out to the main menu. That is such a game development, game design 101 faux pas. It's like, once you get them in the game, don't kick them out. You've just got them in there. You've just paid whatever, hundreds of millions of marketing or whatever, to get these guys in your game. And you play one round and boop. That's weird. So we need them to stay in the round. We want the round to keep going. Basically, it should complete, just like a lot of other games that you've played. Once the round's complete, you get a nice scoreboard, but then a new round starts without any other tomfoolery going on, right? So we want the same thing within Arena Commander and Star Marine as well. So all that matchmaking refactor stuff and the work towards a lobby, where it's just a lot easier for them to set up the settings they would want in Arena Commander or even a Star Marine match, all kind of go together.

Yeah, because actually, touching on that lobby refactor, just being able to change your loadout, select your loadout from a Star Marine point of view. So I think what happened is we had obviously Star Marine and Arena Commander, and we obviously wanted to get those game modes on there to actually test that core gameplay. But the extraneous things, the things that Sean is talking about, the smoothness of not having to kick you out of the game, or how you actually get into the game, is something that we're also going to be focused on going forward, so that we can actually make the whole experience, from you double-clicking the executable to actually getting into the game, to actually continuing to play the game, a lot smoother, so that you can actually stop railing against the machine and actually get into the game and enjoy that aspect. So it's definitely something that's on our mind and something that we're absolutely thinking of going forward.

Well, we've got a lot of thoughts on that, and we've started some stuff internally, and we're really hoping to get this in front of people sooner than later, and a lot sooner than you might think. So, Arena Commander, let's start with Arena Commander. Arena Commander is great, again, I sort of said petri dish. It is the core gameplay of ship combat in Star Citizen. Let's say it's a portion of Star Citizen. It definitely isn't all of it, right? And then you've got Star Marine, which is yet another portion. But then you've got other things within it: again, flight within atmosphere, flight near the ground. You've got, again, different weapon types, different ranges, and things like this. And right now, neither Star Marine nor really Arena Commander, as a standalone product, well represents what Star Citizen, to me and to a lot of the developers, I would think just generally to everybody, really represents. Because Star Citizen is the whole of all of those. It's the whole of a ship. It's the whole of a character. It's the interchange between the two of them, whether it's characters within ships, whether it's characters fighting ships, whether that's ground vehicles fighting air vehicles, air vehicles fighting. Again, it's all of that. It's a mixed arms game. It's a combined arms game. If I was comparing it, Star Citizen is not Call of Duty. It's definitely not Gears of War or anything like that. It's much more akin to a Battlefield. It's much more akin to PlanetSide or something like that, in terms of the core combat gameplay. I'm not saying the economy and everything else. I'm just talking about the core combat gameplay, the pillar that I'm in charge of now. So, yes, there's economy and everything else. So the concept here is, if you could basically take 30 minutes, and I would bring somebody off the street and I'd go, okay, I'm going to show you what Star Citizen is in 30 minutes, right? I kind of don't want them to go load up the PU, because right now if I go load up the PU, even as a developer, I wake up in Port Olisar, I get out of bed, now what? And a brand new guy, if nobody's saying go to the ship terminals, get a ship, go do a mission, go do some mining, whatever, it'll take some time to get into it. And by half an hour, maybe he started mining at that moment. Now, some of us don't have as much time. We really need that 30 minutes to be an adrenaline-filled experience. Like if I could take 30 minutes of the PU in the very best case, like everything went exactly how we want it to be set up: we've got people here, we've got people here, they've got these vehicles, they've got these vehicles, this is the scenario that they have to go in. That would be an enthralling and exciting experience to me. And that would more represent what Star Citizen ultimately really is and what happens within the PU. So the best thing we can get is getting combat to work within a sort of round-based, objective-based, scenario-based game, like it works in the PU, basically. So give some reasons for a lot of the stuff to exist. Again, I'm rambling a little bit, but the Ballista is a great example. Right now, cool, in the PU you can go grab that Ballista, you can cart it over to one of the planets and kind of sit in it and hope somebody flies by, and eventually lock them on and shoot them down. That's going to take some time, and maybe you get a minute or two of excitement and it's over. I want to give reasons for these things that we've created to exist, really. Again, they would really have a big part in that game mode, like the Ballista, for example, or a Valkyrie, for example. Those things are really, really meaningful in those sort of setups, and they all have roles, and I think those roles, in a lot of cases, haven't really been pushed. They haven't really been identified that clearly or proved in that sense. So, again, the Ballista being a really powerful anti-air. How? Show me. Show me it happening, right? And again, it will take some time for that to happen in the PU, but I think putting something together that's kind of the combination of Arena Commander and Star Marine makes a lot of sense.

Building a microcosm. If the Persistent Universe is the macrocosm, taking Star Marine and Arena Commander and turning it into a microcosm, a condensed version of what you could experience in the PU.

Yes, but without massively changing the rules, right? Everybody's going to come into it with a certain set of expectations in terms of how it works already in the PU. Now, because of the concept of, again, Electronic Access being a simulation, yeah, we could probably get away with changing a lot of it, but we don't want it to be a different game. Also, we don't have the resources to actually make a whole separate sort of game, and that's one of the difficulties with doing this. I think that's going to be a very interesting idea to research.

I think the other thing as well, when we look at that, is that if we make it more representative of the PU, it's more efficient on the development side as well. We're looking at designing these systems that are feeding the PU, going into Squadron. And if these systems are all being utilized in that same manner, then it helps us make better decisions. Because if we're trying to make, oh, well, the gunplay is not very good in the PU, but it's great in Star Marine. Well, that's not what we want. What we want is that Star Marine is representative of what the PU is. And then we know that if it's good in the PU, it's good in Star Marine. And that's why, when we talk about, say, the Good Doctor, for example, trying to have a bit longer lines of sight. Or when we've released attachments, so scopes, so you've got more view sight, you've got longer ranges. So I think that's something that we absolutely want to go towards, that Star Marine and Arena Commander are more reflective. Like you said, that five-minute adrenaline-filled junkie section, or I always call it the trailer of the PU. It's all of the condensed good bits, where we say, okay, this is what it could be. Like the microcosm that you said. And then that gives us, from a development side of things, that any feedback that we get, anything that we want to change, any balance that we want to work towards, we're using those resources efficiently across all three products. Not just, okay, we're doing this for Star Marine. Because then you get a really dangerous balance where we're dealing with multiple different SKUs. And to be honest, that's not what we want. We want it to be good across all three. So that's definitely something that we've discussed previously.

I wouldn't say they're designed with that mentality in mind, necessarily. I think it's almost the other direction, a little more, where something that got created for the PU, we want to try to reuse as much as possible. So, super interesting: on the Good Doctor map, very little of that is brand new art. Very little. A bit of the exercise areas, some of the treadmills, the dumbbells. The dumbbells had to be made. That got made. But generally, that was reused building sets. And that's the whole idea here, that we don't need a 100-man team to make this new stuff. We've got 90 gigs worth of assets.

Modular assets.

Yeah, that we can use. And actually, if you can get that stuff together and make it look as good as that looks, right? That looks totally unique in its own sense. Why not? Now, having said that, it is a representation of what the Leir II planet would be. Having said that, it's not actually what Leir II is going to be in the actual PU. Now, can I sort of hand-wave this away, where it's like, well, it's Electronic Access, it's just a simulation, so kind of, yeah? But the reality of it is that we've not made Leir II as a planet yet. And actually what we created, we really wanted to have a planetside location. We wanted it to be on Leir II because of the story and the lore and everything. So yeah, we took the Hurston planet, tweaked it, dropped the map on it and called it a day, right? So this is not taking a whole team's worth of people to do that. Yeah, we want to tweak it a little bit, but Leir II will likely end up looking a little bit different, but let's say that we're kind of teasing what it might look like. So I would say that the mentality is actually not the way of building those specific things for Arena Commander, Star Marine, or any other mode for that matter, and then giving them over to the PU. It's more that the PU will build something and we will consume it as much as possible.

I think when we come to balancing anything, really, we want to be tuning it for what feels fun for everybody. I think tuning it for a specific part of the player base doesn't give us what we want. So if we tuned it for some of the highly skilled players, I think the more inexperienced players would have a harder time. And vice versa, if you tuned it just for the new people, then the more skilled players wouldn't have an effective time. So I think what we want to do is actually provide an experience that is accessible to everybody, but also has enough depth for the more experienced players to actually invest more time, learn how to use those mechanics and go forward from there. So I think from a balance point of view, any system, not just FPS weapons, you always balance it for the middle ground, so that it is as accessible as it absolutely can be, so that people can come in. And especially when you're talking about Star Marine and Arena Commander, where it's basically drop-in, it's plug and play. I think obviously less so in the PU, where you've got more time to kind of absorb what's there, kind of understand that it's a slower pace. You have more opportunity to learn. I think in terms of FPS gunplay, though, you absolutely have to tune the weapons so that you get a good sense of feel. How does this feel from a realism point of view? How does it feel from an audio point of view? How does it feel from the visuals or the gameplay point of view? Is it all tying together to create that one unique experience for this gun, so that if you drop that pistol and then you get another pistol, they feel different? It provides a different experience. So I think when we are tuning weapons, we're tuning to play styles, not to skill. And I think those play styles are what define the roles that you play in combat. So if you're looking at a sniper, then you're wanting long-range combat. If you're looking at an AR, then you're looking at more of a medium-range combat. SMG, shotgun, then you're looking at more close-range combat. And then you might want to mix it up. You might want to provide a pistol, but it has a 10-inch barrel so that it provides more mid-range suppression. So I think from the point of view of FPS weapon balance, you always balance to play styles and then absolute accessibility. But then maybe we have different fire modes. So the Salvo, for example, which has a secondary fire mode: if somebody just picks that up as a new player, they can use it, fire it, it's a 50-cal weapon, they'll do well, point and shoot. But vice versa, if you want to be, okay, I'm going to use the frag mode, I'm going to change the fire mode, I'm going to add attachments, I'm going to add a laser dot, or maybe I'll go for an underbarrel flashlight. It's all of those decisions that add depth to the combat that allow other players, the more experienced players, to invest in that. And I think that's something that we'd always try to do. So I suppose, to answer your question in short, we don't balance for either. It's a different type of balancing.

For inclusiveness.

Yes, absolutely. Because we want people who play the game to ultimately enjoy the game. And I think that goes for the PU and AC and SM. When I was much younger, I was much more hardcore FPS, I want to shoot. But as I got older, family, you don't have as much time to invest. So I think we want to cater for all different types of players. And when you think about it, play styles is always the best way to think about it. It's like, why would we make this weapon? Why does it exist? What purpose is it delivering in the combat? Why would you pick this weapon over this other weapon? And I think that's something that we've actually been looking at with the new weapons, and we actually want to revisit a lot of the old weapons. And I think, to be honest, balance is something that never stops, especially in an online game. It's something that you're constantly, constantly going over. Okay, the meta's changed here, or this new weapon has changed the dynamic. Or, for example, we were talking about healing. Healing might totally change how effective alpha strike weapons are. If you've got a shotgun, but all of a sudden your friend can revive that person who's just been shot and taken out, then it changes that dynamic. So I think balance is something that's always an ongoing process across the whole game, not just FPS weapons, but economy, your ship balance, the flight model. So that's something that we'd always endeavor to work on. But it's something that we've actually been really focusing on in terms of the weapons, to actually try and find a unique existence for each weapon. With any new weapon going forward, we're hoping to try and get that niche, unique gameplay and how that feels, so that it gives you a real identity in terms of why you want to use that weapon. And vice versa, look at all the existing weapons that we've already released and say, okay, maybe the shotguns, for example, are feeling too similar. Maybe we want to change one to be full auto, or that kind of thing. It's something that's constantly being worked on. But yeah, hopefully that gives you a bit more insight into how we go about working on the weapons.

Yeah, and most people know I'm coming from a MechWarrior background too, so I'm a big fan of that. Now, we're not going to do Tribes, okay, so you're not going to be skiing. So it's not going to be repetitious jumps; you're not going to be bounce, bounce, bounce. But if you see a cookie at a really high cabinet, you'll be able to make that one jump. So we're kind of calling it jump assist. So yes, it uses your thruster pack from EVA and everything, that's the whole concept of it. But it's much more of a, bounce is the wrong word, much more of a jump assist, a one-time jump assist, and then it'll take some time.

It makes you Jordan, not Buzz Lightyear.

That is an amazing way to put it. It makes you Michael Jordan, not Buzz Lightyear.

And I think also that allows us, as we touch on future armor gameplay, to have a differentiation between different types of armor. So I think some armors will be more associated with the jump assist, and the heavier armors maybe less so. It's just one of the many different things that we're going to utilize to differentiate different armors going forward.

Not really, to be totally honest with you guys. There's not a huge update on it, and I'll tell you why. We've talked pretty much this whole time about the coexistence of the PU, Squadron and Electronic Access, and the fact that they all kind of play off each other, right? So there's work that happens here that can be applied here, there's work that happens in the PU that can be applied there. SataBall is totally unique in its own regard, right? The idea of it, the concept of it, doesn't exist anywhere else in Star Citizen. It's a zero-G-only thing. It's not core gameplay at all. It is a whole different set of gameplay that only exists in that one mode. So if we had the resources, it's really, really hard for me to put them on that, because it's only serving that, and it's not serving some PU stuff, it's not serving some Squadron stuff, it's not serving just Arena Commander, Star Marine as its own thing. So basically everything that we're trying to put resources on, Richard was running through the weapons and the armor gameplay and all this, all of it's benefiting the PU, Squadron 42, and then Arena Commander and Star Marine. So we need to work on those things, because we don't have that many. It is the lowest priority in terms of the three games. So I can't feel okay working on a specific mechanic for only that area that only benefits that one little section.

Okay, so before I get too far, Chris will behead me if I go 'SataBall ain't happening'. That's not what I'm saying. This is not at all what I'm saying. I would love to do this. It's just in the priority set, it's a little bit lower because of that mechanic. Now, to go back to the push-pull sort of concept, you're right, that might help push-pull, or it might even slow it down, because of the requirements. Within Squadron 42, I'm sure there'll be a zero-G section where we use push-pull in some way, right? Hopefully, right? So I'm not made a liar later.

I doubt you'll be holding a SataBall.

That's kind of my point, right? Yeah, okay, maybe it'll help it, but it'll probably actually slow it down, if anything, because it's so unique in its own sense. It's not just push-pull with a weapon, no, it's push-pull with a ball and a gun. So it's just this one unique bit that I just can't put people on when it doesn't benefit the mass of stuff that we need to do.

I think one thing as well to reflect on is that we're talking about all of the new things that we want to add to the game, but I don't think any of us here would say that we're happy with the core gameplay, what's there right now. So in terms of the core gameplay, we still feel like we've got a long way to go. We've got some really good plans that we want to action. We've got some really good ideas in terms of making AC and SM more reflective of the PU, to make us more efficient on the development side, to make us make better decisions. So I think we've got an idea of where we want the core game to be. And I think when we get there, it's going to be a really exciting time. But we've still got new things coming along the way as well. So zero-G push-pull is obviously a perfect example. But then it comes down to intent and focus. And the intent and focus on zero-G push-pull is to deliver zero-G push-pull and that mechanic. And that's not a trivial mechanic to deliver. It's basically climbing in space. I think when you look at all of the things that we want to focus on, you absolutely want to get that foundational core gameplay there. You want to get that absolutely solid and foundational. And then obviously, because we're a live product, we're constantly adding new things to the game, because we're a large team. We have lots of focus. But I think when you come down to, say, SataBall, it's something that's so unique and bespoke, really, I think we'd be doing it at the expense of something where we really want to get the foundations right first. So I think, just backing up Sean's point really, the core gameplay is something that we want to get focused. We really want to get that driving and going forward and honing that down to something that absolutely is delivering on the vision of the three products. And then we can start adding in the new mechanics. And then, once we've got those new mechanics, say zero-G push-pull, the larger mechanics, then it's something that we can look at in the future.